The present invention relates to a production system for mounting electronic components to circuit boards.
A conventional example of the production system referred to above will be described with reference to FIG. 8.
As shown in FIG. 8, a solder printing unit 101, a component mounting unit 102 and a soldering unit 103 are sequentially arranged in the downstream direction along a transfer line 110 of a production system.
In the solder printing unit 101, a solder printing device 104 prints cream solder on lands of a to-be-printed article such as a circuit board or the like. An inspecting device 105 inspects the state of both the circuit board and the solder printing unit 101 along with the printing state.
In the component mounting unit 102, a component mounting device 106 moves a suction nozzle using an XY driving device, so that the suction nozzle transfers an electronic component to a mounting position on the circuit board from a feeding position. The electronic component is placed on the cream solder printed on the land of the circuit board while a component recognizing camera controls the suction nozzle to avoid erroneous operations. An inspecting device 107 inspects the state of the component and the component mounting unit 102 and also the mounting state of the component.
On the other hand, in the soldering unit 103, the circuit board transferred on a transfer conveyor from the solder printing unit 101 and component mounting unit 102 is heated by the hot wind of a heater and a fan of a soldering device 108 in a reflow furnace, so that the solder is melted. Subsequently, the solder is cooled and hardened to be set. A soldering inspecting device 109 inspects both the state of the soldering unit 103 and the soldering state.
In the case where the equipment experiences some types of trouble, the equipment is stopped, and a trouble message displayed on the monitor of each device. A machine operator makes repair work based on the message.
For preventive maintenance, a predetermined maintenance work is carried out for each device at a suitable occasion in accordance with the judgement of the machine operator.
The quality of products is summed and analyzed independently for every product irrespective of the trouble of the equipment or whether the maintenance work is executed.
Likewise, the quality of the equipment is summed and analyzed separately for each device irrespective of the trouble or maintenance work.
In the above-described conventional arrangement, the inspecting data of the quality of products, the data related to the solution of troubles, and the data related to the execution of the maintenance work are summed and analyzed independently and separately with no correlation therebetween. Therefore, it is impossible in the conventional analyzing system to predict or estimate the effect or result from the cause, or vice versa for the quality of products, troubles, and maintenance work.
Because of the aforementioned drawback inherent in the prior art, the equipment suddenly runs into trouble in some cases, and the product quality cannot be secured stably.
Moreover, the troubles are handled without any special thought and largely depending on the skill of the experienced operators. It is consequently difficult to represent the countermeasures against troubles by numerical values or rules to take suitable actions promptly in response to the troubles. Since trouble-shooting takes a lot of time, the working efficiency of the equipment is greatly decreased.